Adventures
With Cassiopaea
Chapter
29
In recent
years, Censorinus' authority has come under more serious questioning than
in Petrie's day, though it certainly hasn't improved matters among Egyptologists
in general:
The most
significant advance made in the study of ancient Egyptian chronology
in recent years is the repudiation by Neugebauer and others of an astronomical
origin for the Egyptian civil calendar and, as a corollary, the elimination
of the so-called [Sothic Cycle] as a factor in dating the earliest periods
of Egyptian History. [Chapter VI (Chronology 1. Egypt to the End
of the Twentieth Century) of "The Cambridge Ancient History"
Volume 1 part 1, 1970]
What this
means is that the repudiation of the Sothic cycle was utilized by the
Egyptologists to arbitrarily bring the date for the start of the dynastic
period down about 1,000 years from the dates proposed by Sir William Flinders
Petrie. What is utterly bizarre is that this paragraph informs us that
even though the Sothic Cycle theory has now been proven wrong, nevertheless,
the Egyptologist citing this fact, in the same chapter, goes on to prove
that the dates of the Middle Kingdom are based precisely on that theory!
For the
fixing in time of the [Egyptian Middle Kingdom] and the periods preceding
it, the key date is the seventh year of the reign of King Sesostris
III of the Twelfth Dynasty. In this year, a helical rising of the star
Sothis (our Sirius) was recorded on 16. VIII of the 365-day civil calendar,
a fact which, thanks to the regular displacement of this calendar, in
relation to the true astronomical year, allows the year in question
to be placed between 1876 and 1864 BC, with every probability favoring
1872 BC.[Ibid.]
So we see
that, by talking out of both sides of his mouth at once, the Egyptologist
has gleefully announced that the Sothic cycle has been discredited, and
then has used it to date the Middle Kingdom. Well, put on your hip waders
because it gets worse.
Since
this date, 1872 BC, is one of the keys of all ancient chronology, we
will devote more careful attention to it as a test case for the validity
of the astronomical dating of the second millennium BC. How was this
date determined?
The dating
of the 7th year of Sesostris III to about 1872 BC is based on the alleged
ability of historians and astronomers to derive an absolute calender
date from a reference like "Year 7: Sothis rose heliacally on month
four of Coming Forth (or Winter), day 16." For such dating to
be valid we must first make a number of assumptions: 1) The ancient
record is accurate; 2) It has been correctly translated and interpreted
by the modern linguist; 3) The astronomical event is uniquely identifiable
so that we can actually pinpoint the astronomical event which the text
is describing; 4) The ancient astronomical observations and records
were sufficiently precise to be useful to modern astronomers for calculating
precise dates; 5) The event is dated in an undisturbed and precisely
known local calendar, or we have adequate knowledge of any calendar
changes, so that we are able to make the transition from our modern
calendar to the ancient calendar. Unfortunately, there are grounds
for questioning the validity of every one of these assumptions in the
case of the text underlying the 1872 BC. date. We will now turn to
an examination of the evidence for this date.
To begin
with, the Kahun or Ilahum Papyrus, the text which is used to date the
reign of Sesostris III does not even contain the name of Sesostris.
The text, which was found in the temple of Sesostris II simply says
"Year 7-you should know that the rising of Sothis occurs on
the 16 th day of the 4th month of Coming Forth." The name
of the king is missing. Sesostris III is associated with the text on
the basis of comparing the handwriting of this text and the handwriting
of other texts found at the same place, which do contain the name of
Sesostris III.
If the
text really belongs to some other king of the Twelfth Dynasty, the margin
of error in dating the pharoahs could be as much as 200 years. Richard
Parker defends the assigning the papyrus to Sesostris III on the basis
of lengths of reign among the pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty and on
an appropriate pattern for lunar dates for the reigns of various pharaohs
of the Twelfth Dynasty, but there is an element of circular argument
here, because Parker's analysis of these other lunar dates is based
on the prior assumption that the Kahun Papyrus belongs to Sesostris
III. [
]
Parker
gives no real basis for his assumption that the reign of Amenemet III,
another candidate to be the pharaoh of the papyrus, must be limited
to the narrow range of dates which he has selected.[
] It is also noteworthy
that the crucial Kahun Papyrus had still not been published almost 80
years after its discovery so the opportunity to examine it has been
limited to the inner circle of Egyptologists.
There
are also archeological grounds which would lead us to take a closer
look at this Sothic date. When this Sothic date was accepted, it became
necessary to lower the date of Sesostris by over 100 years from the
date that had already been established on the basis of literary texts.
The discovery of Sothic dating also required considerable shortening
of the time interval between the Twelfth and Eighteenth Dynasties which
had previously been accepted. Borchardt also reports that archeological
finds which have been associated with Sesostris were found together
with the earliest types of Mycenaean Ware. This type of ware is dated
to the 15th century, not the 19th century, the period to which Sesostris
has been dated. Since Borchardt gave no further description of this
ware, it is unclear exactly what he meant by "earliest Mycenaean
ware." [Brug, John, Ph.D. op. cit.]
I hope the
reader noticed the remark about the Kahun papyrus being kept in the "inner
circle" of Egyptologists for 80 years. The reference to Mycenaean
ware is also curious. We will come to that. For now, let's continue
with Petrie's comments about the "anchors" of Egyptian dating.
Following
the end of the Twelfth Dynasty is 1786 BC, the next astronomically determinable
'anchor-point' in Egyptian history is the ninth year of the reign of
King Amenophis I, the second ruler of the Eighteenth Dynasty. This
year, in which according to the calendrical table of the medical [Papyrus
Eber], a heliacal rising of Sothis occurred on 9.XI of the civil calendar
can be fixed with a high degree of probability at 1537 BC. [Ibid.]
And so we
see that two "fixed points" in Egyptian history are based upon
a theory which has been discredited, and the only real difference between
the latter date and that given by Petrie is about 50 years, while we have
certainly eliminated over a thousand years from the first example! But
again we find that this is rather arbitrary:
The second
most important Sothic date is the Ebers Papyrus date, which has been associated
with the ninth year of Amenhotep I (supposedly 1540 BC). This date is
a key to the dating of the Egyptian New Kingdom and the Late Bronze Age
in neighboring countries. Concerning this text too there has been a great
deal of dispute about the date and the name of the pharaoh. For 20 years
the Egyptologists who first worked with the text argued about the identity
of the pharaoh because of the lack of clarity of the script. Identifications
of the pharaoh ranged from the Pyramid Age to the Hellenistic period.
A third
Sothic date is derived from an Elephantine inscription which has been
assigned to the time of Thutmose III. This text says, "Epiphi,
day 28, the day of the festival of the rising of Sothis." This
text includes neither the name of the pharaoh in question nor the year
of his reign in which the text was written. It is noteworthy that none
of the three principal Sothic texts includes undisputed evidence of the
name of the pharaoh in question, but all three are connected with a particular
pharaoh by means of association with other finds.
A fourth
Sothic date is from a calendar found in Ramses III's temple at Medinet
Habu, which has been associated with either Ramses II or Ramses III (1316
or 1196 BC.) It gives only a month, not a day of the month, in its citation.
Thereforer at best the date can be narrowed down only to a range of about
a century since it takes about 120 years for the rising of Sothis to move
through a month of the Egyptian year. It is, therefore, impossible to
assign this date to a specific pharaoh. It seems to fit with Ramses III
according to the present system of Sothic dating. If it belongs to Ramses
II, present Sothic dating is incorrect.
Another
controversial item of Sothic dating is the so-called "era of Menophres."
This discussion is based on a statement in the late classical writer,
Theon [who] says: On the 100th year of the era of Diocletian, concerning
the rising of the Dog, because of the pattern we received from the era
of Menophres to the end of the age of Augustus the total of the elapsed
years was 1605. (My translation). Theon makes no mention of Sothic dating,
but it has been supposed that Theon is referring to the start of the same
Sothic cycle which Censorinus tells us began around 1321 BC. (From the
Age of Diocletian in 284 AD subtract 1605 years which leads to 1321 BC.)
Remember that Theon has elsewhere expressly stated that a Sothic cycle
began in 26 BC, so if we accept the above interpretation of his Menophres
comment, Theon is contradicting himself, or else he did not realize the
implications of his remark about Menophres.
Many attempts
have been made to identify Theon's Menophres. Menophres has been identified
as the city Memphis or one of a number of pharaohs. Merneptah, Seti I,
Harmhab, and Ramses I are among the candidates that have been suggested.
There is simply not enough evidence to draw any firm conclusions about
the meaning of this text.
Now, let's
go back to the remark about Neugebauer discrediting the Sothic dating.
When we follow this thread and discover who Neugebauer was and what Neugebauer
really said about the Egyptians, we come to an astonishing fact.
To fully grasp the importance of Neugebauer's words, it is important to
know who he was and what he did.
Otto Neugebauer
was the most original and productive scholar of the history of the exact
sciences, perhaps of the history of science, of our age. He began as
a mathematician, turned first to Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics,
and then took up the history of mathematical astronomy, to which he
afterward devoted the greatest part of his attention. In a career of
sixty-five years, he to a great extent created our understanding of
mathematical astronomy from Babylon and Egypt, through Greco-Roman antiquity,
to India, Islam, and Europe of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Through
his colleagues, students, and many readers, his influence on the study
of the history of the exact sciences remains profound, even definitive.[
]
His thesis
Die Grundlagen der δgyptischen Bruchrechnung (Springer, 1926),
was principally an analysis of the table in the Rhind Papyrus for the
expression of fractions of the form 2/n as a sum of different
unit fractions, fractions with the numerator 1, and curiously stirred
up a good deal of controversy.
Since
1927, however, he had been investigating a more important and interesting
subject, namely, Babylonian mathematics, for which he had learned
Akkadian and worked in Rome with Father P. A. Deimel, S. J., of the
Pontificio Istituto Biblico. His first paper on Babylonian mathematics,
in 1927, was an account of the origin of the sexagesimal system, and
by 1929 he was gathering new material at Berlin and other collections
for the publication of a substantially complete corpus of texts. During
the next few years, he published a number of articles, mostly in QS
B, and eventually published the corpus in Mathematische Keilschrift-Texte
(MKT) (QS A 3, 3 vols., 1935-37). MKT is a colossal
work, in size, in detail, in depth, and its contents show that the riches
of Babylonian mathematics far surpass anything one could imagine from
a knowledge of Egyptian and Greek mathematics.[
]
The culmination
of these writings was The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (1951,
2nd ed. 1957), a survey of Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics and astronomy,
and their relation to Hellenistic science and its descendants.[
]
Astronomical
Cuneiform Texts (ACT) was finally published in three volumes
in 1955 by the Institute for Advanced Study, and immediately marked
a new age in the study of ancient astronomy. Neugebauer had assembled
in all about three hundred texts, most dating from the last three centuries
B.C. Through years of assiduous calculation, he had dated and completed
damaged texts and joined fragments, and he set out all this material
with full philological and technical analysis of the underlying theory,
computational procedure, and astronomical application.[
] The first
volume contains ephemerides of lunar theory and eclipses and the procedure
texts for their computation, the second planetary ephemerides and procedure
texts, and the third the translations of the restored ephemerides and
photographs or hand copies of all the texts. In the preface he expressed
his respect to the shades of the scribes of Enuma-Anu-Enlil. "By
their untiring efforts they built the foundations for the understanding
of the laws of nature which our generation is applying so successfully
to the destruction of civilization. Yet they also provided hours of
peace for those who attempted to decode their lines of thought two thousand
years later."
Next was
Egyptian astronomy. There are two sorts, from older, purely Egyptian
sources, such as tomb ceilings and coffin lids, and from later, Hellenistic
sources, monumental zodiacs and papyri, sometimes showing Greek or Babylonian
influences. None of it is very sophisticated, and Neugebauer was always
at pains to lay the ghost of profound Egyptian astronomical wisdom.[
]
It was a task that took more than twenty years to complete, but at last
during 1960-69 the three volumes (in four) of Egyptian Astronomical
Texts (EAT) were published by Brown. Here it was at last,
all the Egyptian wisdom: decans, constellations, and star clocks of
the Middle and New Kingdoms, Hellenistic monumental zodiacs and papyri,
including all those previously published. And what did it amount to?
With particular perversity Neugebauer began the ten-page section on
Egypt in his later History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy
with the provocative sentence, "Egypt has no place in a work on
the history of mathematical astronomy." [Swerdlow, N.M., The
Babylonian Theory of the Planets, Princeton University Press, ISBN:
0-691-01196-6]
Did you
catch that? What Neugebauer is telling us is that the Egyptians were
scientifically illiterate. He read and examined everything. All
the Egyptologists who were inculcated into the belief of the superiority
of Egyptian science were sending him their papyri and inscriptions from
tombs and monuments. All the things that it is so difficult to get hold
of nowadays, were sent to Neugebauer. And what did Neugebauer say?
Mathematics
and astronomy played a uniformly insignificant role in all periods of
Egyptian history. [
] The fact that Egyptian mathematics has preserved
a relatively primitive level makes it possible to investigate a stage
of development which is no longer available in so simple a form, except
in the Egyptian documents.
To some
extent Egyptian mathematics has had some, though rather negative, influence
on later periods. Its arithmetic was widely based on the use of unit
fractions, a practice which probably influenced the Hellenistic and
Roman administrative offices and thus spread further into other regions
of the Roman empire. [
]The influence of this practice is visible even
in works of the stature of the Almagest, where final results are often
expressed with unit fractions in spite of the fact that the computations
themselves were carried out with sexagesimal fractions. [
] And this
old tradition doubtless contributed much to restricting the sexagesimal
place value notation to a purely scientific use.
It would
be quite out of proportion to describe Egyptian geometry here at length.
It suffices to say that we find in Egypt about the same elementary level
we observed in contemporary Mesopotamia.
The role
of Egyptian mathematics is probably best described as a retarding force
upon numerical procedures. Egyptian astronomy had much less influence
on the outside world for the very simple reason that it remained through
all its history on an exceedingly crude level which had practically
no relations to the rapidly growing mathematical astronomy of the Hellenistic
age. Only in one point does the Egyptian tradition show a very beneficial
influence, that is, in the use of the Egyptian calendar by the Hellenistic
astronomers. This calendar is, indeed, the only intelligent calendar
which ever existed in human history. A year consists of 12 months of
30 days each and five additional days at the end of each year.
A second
Egyptian contribution to astronomy is the division of the day into 24
hours, through these hours were originally not of even length,, but
were dependent on the seasons. [
]
Lunar
calendars played a role since early times side by side with the schematic
civil calendar of the 365 -day year. An inscription of the Middle Kingdom
mentions "great" and "small" years, and we known
now that the "great" years were civil years which contained
13 new moon festivals in contrast to the ordinary "small"
years with only 12 new moons. The way these intercalations were regulated,
at least in the latest period, is shown by the Demotic text.
This Demotic
text contains a simple periodic scheme which is based on the fact that
25 Egyptian civil years (which contain 9125 days) are very nearly equal
to 309 mean lunar months. These 309 months are grouped by our text
into 16 ordinary years of 12 lunar months, and 9 "great" years
of 13 months. Ordinarily two consecutive lunar months are given 59
days by our scheme, obviously because of the fact that one lunar month
is close to 291/2 days long. But every 5th year the two
last months are made 60 days long. This gives for the whole 25 year
cycle the correct total of 9125 days.
Since
at this period all astronomical computations were carried out in the
sexagesimal system, at least as far as fractions are concerned, the
equinoctial hours were divided sexagesimally. Thus our present division
of the day into 24 hours of 60 minutes each is the result of a Hellenistic
modification of an Egyptian practice combined with Babylonian numerical
procedures.
Finally,
we have to mention the decans. [
] The decans are the actual reason
for the 12 division of the night and hence, in the last analysis, of
the 24 hour system. Again, in Hellenistic times the Egyptian
decans were brought into a fixed relation to the Babylonian zodiac which
is attested in Egypt only since the reign of Alexander's successors.
In this final version the 36 decans are simply the thirds of the zodiacal
signs, each decan representing 10 degrees of the ecliptic. Since the
same period witnesses the rapid development of astrology, the decans
assumed an important position in astrological lore and in kindred fields
such as alchemy, the magic of stones and plants and their use in medicine.
In this disguise the decans reached India, only to be returned in still
more fantastic form to the Muslims and the West. [
]
[In the
decans] we have not a calendar but a star clock. The user of
this list would know the hour of night by the rising of the decan
which is listed in the proper decade of the month. [
]
We call
this phenomenon the "heliacal rising" of S, using a term of
Greek astronomy. [...]
It is
this sequence of phenomena which led the Egyptians to measure the
time of night by means of stars, which we now call decans. This
was intended to devise some method of indicating the times of office
for the nightly service in the temples, (and other practical reasons.)
Just as the months were divided into decades, so were the services of
the hour-stars. For 10 days, S indicated the last hour of night, then
the next star for the next ten days, and so on. [
]
All this
was, in fact, taken into account by the inventors of the decanal hours,
as can be demonstrated by the terminal section of the "diagonal
calendars" on the coffin lids. [
] By the time of the New Kingdom,
the usefulness of the decans as indicators of hours had ceased. [
]
The decans held a secure position as representatives of the decades
of the year in the decoration of astronomical ceilings, as in the tomb
of Senmut or in the cenotaph of Seti I. In this form, they continued
to exist until their association with the zodiac of the Hellenistic
period revived them and made them powerful elements of astrological
doctrine.
The coffins
with the "diagonal calendars" belong roughly to the period
from 2100 BC to 1800 BC. [
] Astronomical accuracy was nowhere seriously
attempted in these documents. [
]
In summary,
from the almost three millennia of Egyptian writing, the only texts
which have come down to us and deal with a numerical prediction of astronomical
phenomena belong to the Hellenistic or Roman period. None of the
earlier astronomical documents contains mathematical elements; they
are crude observational schemes, partly religious, partly practical
in purpose. Ancient science was the product of a very few men; and
these few happened not to be Egyptians. [Neugebauer, Otto, The
Exact Sciences in Antiquity, 1969, Dover, New York]
Continue
to page 257
The owners and publishers
of these pages wish to state that the material presented here is the product
of our research and experimentation in Superluminal Communication. We invite
the reader to share in our seeking of Truth by reading with an Open, but skeptical
mind. We do not encourage "devotee-ism"
nor "True Belief." We DO encourage the seeking of Knowledge and Awareness in
all fields of endeavor as the best way to be able to discern lies from truth.
The one thing we can tell the reader is this: we work very hard, many hours
a day, and have done so for many years, to discover the "bottom line" of our
existence on Earth. It is our vocation, our quest, our job. We constantly seek
to validate and/or refine what we understand to be either possible or probable
or both. We do this in the sincere hope that all of mankind will benefit, if
not now, then at some point in one of our probable futures.
Contact Webmaster at cassiopaea.com
Copyright © 1997-2009 Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk. All
rights
reserved. "Cassiopaea, Cassiopaean, Cassiopaeans," is a registered
trademark of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk.
Letters addressed to Cassiopaea, Quantum Future School, Ark or Laura, become
the property of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Republication
and re-dissemination of the contents of this screen or any portion of this website
in any manner is expressly prohibited without prior written consent.
You are visitor number [an error occurred while processing this directive]
.
|
